Well-known Ukrainian journalist Tetyana Chornovil brutally beaten UPDATE

On the eve of December 25, unidentified men assaulted the journalist and EuroMaidan activist  Tetiana Chornovol, Ukrainska Pravda reports.

The assault took place in Boryspil. According to Tetiana Chornovol, she was taking a turn to the village Gora, where she lives, when she noticed she was being tailed. She took a sharp turn back to Boryspil, but the car that followed her started to push her car to the roadside and rammed several times. She stopped the car. Two men ran out of the pursuing car and broke the back window in her car. She jumped out of the car and tried to escape, but they caught her and started beating her and then just left her in a ditch.

According to the police, on December 25 at 0.40 a.m. outside the city on the road Kyiv-Boryspil road police officers found a car on a roadside. Not far from it in a ditch they saw an injured woman. They rendered her first aid.

The police investigation and operational group arrived to the site and identified the injured woman as Tetiana Chornovil. She was not able to describe the attackers. The police brought her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a concussion, numerous bruises, a broken nose and several fractures, and she was not able to walk by herself; she was taken into surgery to have her face stitched up. She will require more surgeries.

Her relatives received a call about her already from the hospital. At 4 a.m. she was transferred to a hospital in Kyiv. Currently she is in an intensive care unit.

Oleksiy Grytsenko, the activist whom Tetiana gave a phone call on that night, informed Hromadske.TV that on December 24 Tetiana went to make photos of the mansions of the Minister of Internal Affairs Vitaliy Zakharchenko and the Prosecutor General Victor Pshonka. During her last filming she was being followed. Tetiana managed to post the information about Zakharchenko’s mansion in her blog on the Ukrainska Pravda website.

Chornovol’s car was equipped with a dashboard camera, and EuroMaidan activists took it to analyze the recording.  According to Grytsenko, the preliminary analysis showed that there were three men in that car and the brand of the vehicle and its registration number are visible.

The police investigation under part 2 Article 296 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (‘Hooliganism’) is in the process. The local police invite eyewitnesses of the incident to give their testimonies.